How I am Learning to Write

start from the beginning, dummy

I recently tried writing an essay, and I totally bombed. Thank G-d for friends who care.

I bombed. I bombed so bad. Because what I was giving a structure, but that is not how you write an essay. You write an essay by taking the reader on a journey. That means starting from a point they can actually enter, so they can feel what you are trying to do from the beginning. You have to place them in territory that is at least somewhat familiar. You cannot start in the middle. It’s like giving directions to

This is one reason academic papers are often not very good for beginners. You do not know the territory yet. You do not know what problem the paper is really trying to solve, even when the abstract tells you. Academic papers often make sense only once you are already deep inside that jungle. Then they can point out a specific path that leads to some fountain or treasure. But unless you are already deeply entrenched in that domain, you are not starting from a place where that path means much.

Beginners gain more from walking through a gate to wonderland, than from starting off with a map of the discourse. The map is meaningless if you don’t even know where you are. You know how you can be in a mall or airport, and they have a whole map? Well, the first thing everybody does is look for the “YOU ARE HERE!” The first orientation needs to be about taking the first step.

That is why it does not really make sense for a Philosophy 101 course to be just a history of philosophy or a broad overview of philosophers. A Philosophy 101 course should probably just be reading the Euthyphro and the Apology, and that is it. Then you begin to feel what hurt humanity so much that made them hungry for philosophy. Then, when you read your next philosophy book, you have some sense of what is going on.

You realize there is a serious mission here. You are in a place where you want to question things, because all of a sudden you realize you are in a cave. That is what all philosophy is trying to do: get out of the cave. And then, you see that some people thought philosophy wasn’t about caves at all. That makes this conversation much more interesting! All of a sudden Newton is a philosopher and what does he have to do with Socrates? These questions are beautiful, worth gazing at and being swallowed into.

But sometimes, you get teachers (or essaysists) who start from the middle. They build these intellectual structures, and what they are really trying to say is: you are in the cave, you are in the jungle, you may already have noticed a few possible threads, and now let me show you the palace I think exists. But usually you cannot just jump straight to that palace, because it does not make sense from where you are. You are not in that place at all.

What I was often trying to do in my essays was simply build that palace and show you the inside of it, even though you were nowhere near it at the beginning. What I have to do instead is start where people are.

So my new way of writing an essay is this: first write something like a quasi-academic article that builds the palace, and then step back and ask, how do I guide someone on the journey that would make them realize why I wrote this, why this is needed, and why it matters for them?

This process is dialogical, and it is much harder to do in an essay than in conversation. In conversation, you get constant feedback, and you can begin from whatever shared space you and the other person are already inhabiting.

So I have to write an essay and then dismantle it. I have to ask, what comes first? Not what comes first in my theoretical structure, but what comes first for the reader. What comes first from where they are? I need to place them as close as possible to the heart of the matter, while still making sure they are starting somewhere they can actually reach.

In a sense, this essay is about itself. After writing the first draft, I had to take it apart and put it together again. What you have read is that rebuilt version.